Erskine | Documents

Accessibility

(Access keys info will appear here shortly)

Standards compliance

• All pages on this site are Section 508 approved, complying with all of the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines.  Erskine have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that all these pages are in compliance. It is a judgement call however due to the constantly shifting sands of web standards. 
• All pages on this site aim to validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.  The validation program can determine with 100% accuracy whether a page is valid XHTML. There are still elements we may purposely use that will make certain pages fail.

Links

• Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
• Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

• All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes.  Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
• The majority of banners and headings are made with pure CSS, made to look like images.

Visual design

• This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
• If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references

• W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
• W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
• W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer’s guide to accessibility.
• U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

Accessibility software

• JAWS, a screen reader for Windows.  A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
• Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows.  A downloadable demo is available.
• Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
• Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
• Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle.  A free downloadable version is available.  Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility services

• Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines.  A full-featured commercial version is also available.
• HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
• Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
• Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Related resources

• WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.
• Designing More Usable Web Sites, a large list of additional resources.